MACAAL Talk
The poetic territories of material
Conversation between Joël Andrianomearisoa, Amina Agueznay & Ghitha Triki
Wednesday 30 November 2022
6:30pm GMT+1
At MACAAL & on Facebook
As part of its cultural programme, MACAAL proposes “Poetic territories of matter”, a conversation between Joël Andrianomearisoa and Amina Agueznay, moderated by Ghitha Triki, director of the Attijariwafa bank Foundation’s Art & Culture Department. The discussion invites us to enter the respective universes of the two artists whose productions are intimately linked to craft creation and their collaboration for the exhibition OUR LAND JUST LIKE A DREAM, presented at MACAAL.
About Joël Andrianomearisoa
Born in 1977 in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Joël Andrianomearisoa is an artist living and working between Paris, Antananarivo and Magnat-l’Étrange.
Andrianomearisoa’s work encompasses different mediums and materials, seeking to give form to non-explicit, often abstract, narrations. His mixed-media approach – encompassing sculpture, installation, craft, textile, and through unprecedented collaborations – is informed by his Madagascan roots, itself a country of diverse cultural influences. Imbued with complex emotional experiences, his delicate, often ambiguous works are considered an ongoing series of ever-evolving exercises. Joël Andrianomearisoa is the artistic director of the art centre Hakanto Contemporary in Antananarivo. In 2019, he is the first artist to represent Madagascar at the Venice Biennale, and his work has been exhibited in leading international institutions, including MAXXI (Rome), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (Washington DC), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town). Joël Andrianomearisoa has also inaugurated two public sculptures in Antananarivo in October 2021 with the complicity of the Yavarhoussen Fund. His works are included in important international collections, including the Smithsonian (Washington DC), the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), the Yavarhoussen Collection (Antananarivo), the Sztuki Museum (Łódź) and MACAAL.
About Amina Agueznay
Amina Agueznay was born in 1963 in Casablanca, where she currently lives and works. Her textile installations owe much to her training as an architect, which she practiced for eight years in the United States before returning to Morocco to enter the field of jewellery design. Conceived as true odes to the material, her first collections lead her towards simple objects, of modern form and use, made according to traditional know-how and her own experiments. Returning to certain architectural applications, she then envisaged spectacular ornaments, then XXL body installations that gradually began to take over the entire space at the expense of the body. Her major installations, Cocoon/Alter Cocoon (2010), Skin (2011), Casablanca Green (2015) and Ankabouth (2017) were exhibited respectively at the Mohammed VI Museum in Rabat, in Casablanca, in New York and in Belgium. Today, her appropriation of the materials and know-how around her art has given her international recognition as well as a perfect knowledge of traditional Moroccan arts.
About Ghitha Triki
Ghitha Triki is in charge of the Attijariwafa bank Foundation’s Art & Culture Department, where she has been in charge of artistic programming for over 25 years. Curator of the Group’s collection, she has organised more than 60 exhibitions dedicated to emblematic and emerging figures of Moroccan art, as well as to the enhancement of the cultural heritage of the African space. She has also contributed to reference books in the field. Between 2006 and 2009, in partnership with the FIAV, she initiated Interactions, a pioneering programme to support digital arts.
Ghitha Triki is also involved in the development of the Arts Academy, an incubator for young talents of the Attijariwafa Bank Foundation.